Acceptance is important. We all have a human mind with an ego vulnerable to corruption. We think we are the solution to the problem, but we often aren't.

Nobody really likes Skype and Facebook anymore, but I guess short-term it boosted their numbers. Most applications send annoying notifications. The application owners will rationalize and say anything to look good and imply they are trying to improve society. It's just a rigged game, stop engaging emotionally.

These are uncertain times. A lot of contractors have moved back to permie and competition is high.

You can try to obtain a 6 or 12 month contract if you have a decent stack of emergency cash (e.g. £25k) lying around.

I wouldn't overanalyze it. Try to see your options out there.

If you can get 3 contract offers in 1 month, then obviously you're still fine. If you can get 1 contract offer after trying for 3 months, I'd consider not taking it.

Analyze and feel the market, so you can form your opinion instead of just going based on stories that other people produce. Some people can't find a low-paying job in the best of times. Some people will have plenty of opportunities in the worst of times.

As ever, with contracting you're always taking on some risk when you come to the end of a contract. Much of your ability to get a contract will depend on your network (as well as skills and experience).

A lot of it depends on whether OP is looking to do full time contracting and leave their current job or just fill the 20% of their time they have now. But either way, the best idea is to go and look for the work and see what's around.

The picture seems to be mixed, not just in the contract market. That might mean those out of contract are swarming around what's available, but you only need to land one contract to get started.

Personally, I don't know anyone who's not moved to a new contract for the same client over the financial year boundary, but that's obviously just anecdotal and most of the contractors I know are in the same sector.

Now, I don't know about Freelancing in terms of big businesses and what view their legal departments take, but UK small business doesn't give 2 hoots about IR35.

I read with some amusement a couple of years ago in Private Eye that their freedom of information request to know how many people had been investigated and prosecuted for failure to declare IR35 status had been refused on the grounds that "the answer would undermine the rule of law" (more or less - my memory isn't perfect).

The reason this change is not welcome by the contractors is that many end clients -- primarily large banks and similar corporations -- do not want to bother checking each individual contract; instead they tend to make blanket decisions and declare all external contracts as inside IR35. And being inside IR35 is the worst of both worlds: you get taxed as if you're a full employee, but you're still not entitled to full employee's benefits like paid sick days or holidays.

Too many contractors seem to view lower taxes as one of the perks of being a contractor and in that sense I think the reforms are well-intended though I wont’t say the implementation has been perfect.

It kind of is though? There is a reason why company directors are able to withdraw money as salary or as dividends - their income is less stable, they take more risk, so they are allowed to take more profit in good times but they feel the pain more in bad times too.

Also, as limited company contractors, we haven't received any meaningful support from the government over Corona. Most contractors pay themselves a minimum salary of around £719 / month. The only government support available to such people now is to furlough themselves which gives you £575 / month, which is only a tad above universal credit.

I'm not complaining about that though, its fair enough because we are NOT employees, but thats also why HMRC should stop treating us like employees too.

If you deliberately structure your income to minimise tax you can’t really complain that it also minimises the support available.

Edit since you said you’re not complaining. I understand in-IR35 contracts aren’t eligible for furlough? That’s definitely an example of poor implementation imo.

Thats partially true, but if you look at outside IR-35 contracts, they might go for £400 / day. While the same kind of work but inside IR35 goes for £600 / day. So HMRC are effectively pushing the burden of a flexible work force entirely on the shoulders of contractors and the clients they work for. This is a huge disruption to both businesses and contractors alike, its also questionable if it will even raise enough revenue for HMRC to make the disruption worth it.

> I very much doubt the directors of larger businesses are paying themselves a tiny salary and taking dividends. It seems to be only IT contractors who see it like that.

You're right, directors of big businesses are paying themselves salaries in the 6 figures and taking out even larger dividends. But for myself, I am usually only in work about 6-9 months a year, I've never worked a contract for more than 6 months, when I'm not in work I spend that time learning and up-skilling to invest back into my career and business. I cannot realistically put myself on a salary of £2k / month when its perfectly feasable that I might be out of work for 6 months or more at any one time. The bottom line is that my working conditions and the benefits I receive (or lack thereof) are much closer that of somebody running a "real" business than it is to a permanent employee, so I should not be taxed as an employee.

> I understand in-IR35 contracts aren’t eligible for furlough?

Honestly I have no idea! I've only ever work outside IR35. I would have thought that inside IR-35 would be comparable to gig-economy workers and sole-traders so they should get 80% of their average earnings over the last three years. But again I am not certain of that.

EDIT: If you're talking about people who work the same contract job for 2+ years and are effectively employed by their client despite working through a limited company, then yes I would agree they are cheating the system. But instead of going after those people, HMRC are making the majority of contractors like myself who are genuinely self-employed, pay for the sins of a minority of contractors who are actually in disguised employment.

So far it feels tough, but doable. If I go another month without a good project, I may consider going back to W2.

I'm sure we're all guilty of this sometimes, but it still makes comment sections a bit useless sometimes, because it's not discussing the subject itself.

This is why I love upcoming new technologies that everybody hates, they still have to proof themselves by using rational logic and there isn't much arrogance/ego surround it yet.

It's not good to think too much about yourself and how things reflect to groups of people and yourself, a lot of projection.

Anyway, iPhone rules! Android sucks. Happy Easter.

PS: I teach languages and a lot of people get stuck with looking bad. The ego is your enemy. Most good language learners just practice a lot and don't worry too much about looking bad.

If the bank goes broke, all players switch to the Risk board, and fight each other until the winner becomes the new banker and forcibly takes money from the losers. Kind of like real life.

Edit: photo of board here http://unixorn.azurewebsites.net/img/catane_krieg.jpg

Essentially, everybody has a role in a banana republic government. President hands out money which everyone tries to get into their swiss bank account. If the players are not pleased they can start a revolution and it turns into a Risk game. After a revolution the roles can be switched.

Great fun with the right people.

I want to design a hippie anarchist postcapitalism gift economy game to transition into from choosing to stop playing Monopoly. Set the whole game up as usual, but add Jubilee (holiday of forgiving all debt and redistributing wealth) to top of community chest & General Strike (everyone stops working and paying bills) to chance below the top card (to give Monopoly a second chance to redeem itself? :P ), and then start playing the gift economy game.

So can modify existing games by changing the rules and adding a few homemade cards of your own making.

Not sure what the market for mod kits for existing board games is like or even if one exists, but if you come up with something that your friends enjoy, maybe a kickstart opportunity and worst case, you will have some fun.

- borsjtsj

- schrokkende

borsjtsjch does not exist, borsjtsj does.

I think all the more reason to meditate, be mindful and adopt philosophies that are not always rational, but good instead.

Also, the truth is often very complex or very dark, so thinking is only going to bring incorrect simplified (black/white) conclusions or negativity/resentment.

They were very popular until they went out of business.

They weren't cheap either! I think €99 or even €199, but don't remember well. It was around 8 years ago.

If tax avoidance is legal, is it really tax avoidance? We've had leftist and rightist governments for 30 years saying they want to close tax loop holes, but they seem to be unable to create a system that works and successfully makes large corporations pay tax on profits.

I agree that it's messed up that Facebook and Apple make all their profits on tax havens, but I'm concerned that we are a bit too narcissistic by believing we can create a complex tax system that will solve this.

Humans have a dark side and seem completely unaware that their believes are driven by self-interest, envy and hate rather than making systems that work.

Compare Alphabet, which has ranged from 8-25% in the last four quarters: https://csimarket.com/stocks/singleProfitabilityRatios.php?c....

Companies that produce physical goods in specific geographic locations and sell them in other specific geographic locations cannot play tax games the way tech companies (which sell intangible goods and services created from intangible inputs) can.

Apple can produce an iPhone in China, sell it to Apple HK and Apple HK exports it to Apple US. The main profits can be made this way in HK tax free. (Not sure about apples actual setup. Just an example).

The same way imported iphones lead to an increased trade deficit between China and the US. The profits are made by US companies, the tiny profit for assembly is made in China. This phenomenon is known as "dark matter" in accounting.

In any case, loopholes are entirely the providence of complexity. We need a simple, non-regressive tax scheme that eliminates subsidies for companies. Maybe start with "40% tax" at the top and above (define "top") of income and profit. For individuals and families, turn it down from there down to poverty level (define "poverty level"). For companies, there's no poverty level. Individuals and families get to reduce their taxable income based on children, educational expenses, and medical expenses. Companies get to reduce their taxable income by spending money on valid expenses (paying employees and offering perks, office equipment and supplies, vehicles as necessary to operate the business, etc) - do away with accrual accounting.

The fundamental problem is assigning a jurisdiction to the "profit" from a supply chain that snakes through twelve different countries.

When you pay $50 for a widget, 100% of that is somebody's profit. The retailer sells for $50 and buys for $40. The wholesaler sells for $40 and buys for $30. The manufacturer sells for $30 and pays $20 in salaries and other expenses. The factory employees are paid $20 but pay $15 for rent and food. The landlord and the farmer are paid $10 and $5 and either keep it as profit or have their own expenses that somebody else profits from.

There was originally $50 and, at the end, there is still $50. Somebody has it. It's somebody's profit.

But when the same entity has operations in multiple countries, the "profit" doesn't have a specific country. A US-based company pays $20 to manufacture something in China and sells it for $50 to a customer in Austria. Their total profit was $30, but did they make $10 in each country, or $20 in China and $5 in each of the others, or $25 in the US, $5 in China and nothing in Austria? The assignment is almost totally arbitrary. And when it's completely normal for many types of operations to have single-digit profit margins, that much difference in the arbitrarily assigned price can easily wipe out all the "profit" in any given country.

The answer is to forget about "profit" -- it's all profit. You need to tax the thing that actually happens in your country. If the product is sold there, that's sales tax (or VAT). If the company has a facility there, property tax. If the company employs workers there, payroll taxes. Companies can't avoid this and still do that thing in your country. You can't assign "sales to customers in Austria" to Luxembourg the same way you can assign profits.

Naturally everybody hates this, because countries want companies to sell products and build facilities and hire workers in their country, and don't really want to discourage it (or raise costs / lower wages for their citizens). But you can't tax a company that has no interaction with your country at all. All you can do is tax the interactions it actually has.

Trying to abstract those interactions into "corporate profit" only serves to give the companies an excuse to shuffle the "profit" into a jurisdiction with lower taxes.

The irony to this is Europe’s richest families pay close to nothing in taxes. (It’s why these loopholes stay open.)

Principally routing investment gains through a series of entities, each which assesses transaction expenses, until no taxable gains are left. Luxembourg, Andorra and the Isle of Man are favourites for extracting income. The fixed cost of this plumbing is high, so it only makes sense if you’re investing €10+ million at a time. But it surprised me when I first saw how complicated simple European transactions were compared to American ones. (The former would route through a menagerie of family trusts, companies and other entities. The latter, at worst, would route through a Delaware LLC or Cayman LP.)

Many countries have some kind of exemption for specific taxes. E.g. tax all your IP royalties in a Luxembourg company with 5%. Lawyers at Deloitte and other companies working 24/7 to find such loopholes and find solutions for their clients.

It is an attempt to keep part of the local wealth local. Big corps siphoning local wealth towards fiscal havens, in that depleting territories, concur to social mayhem and the rise of populism. Re-investing part of the profit locally for the communities, would also make the general public more sympathetic.

If you want to talk about self-interest, point the finger at the tech giants.

It could well be motivated by envy. But it can't be any other way because you can only effectively tax people who have the money.

If you have a flat tax on everybody, you simply can't raise enough money to run the government. It has to be at least roughly proportionate to something related to the amount of money that people have. It also has to be available to the government that needs it.

This is one reason why I'm not worried about letting the rich leave the country. How would it be a net loss? Their wealth is primarily hoarded rather than spent, and they use government policy against us. They would still need our markets if they did want to do something productive. I've heard New Zealand is nice.

It's like saying that really consumers are being taxed here because they are the ultimate source of revenue for Apple. True but you can shift the distribution of this burden between consumers and Apple's owners.

There have been a few flawed but widely successful attempts at this style of system. Namely USA style governance systems. I’d even say modern ML comes from a similar, humble insight.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism

Their pricing is amazing, but saving money on a back-up solution that doesn't seem as good as the other cloud storage providers is a dangerous game.

Backblaze is actually faster than Apple Time Machine is on my LAN which slightly bothers me. It also has lower CPU usage.

I originally chose Backblaze after benchmarking the other offers available at the time (Carbonite, Crashplan etc) and Backblaze was by far the fastest.

That's why you need another solution if you are serious about your data, maybe a set of external hard drives (local backup). This way, you have redundancy and little correlation in failure, which greatly improves your general durability. That local storage may be paid with the money you save by getting an "inferior" cloud backup provider.

> 30MBit/s sustained for 3 days isn't unreasonable for a business

We (Backblaze) are seeing more and more consumer internet connections in the USA with 20 Mbit/sec upstreams, I thought they were available most everywhere if you were willing to upgrade your internet package "just a bit". 30 Mbits is a little unusual for "consumer", but not unheard of. Of course, there is a "selection bias" when you look at online backup users. :-)

From Comcast: The Terabyte Internet Data Usage Plan is a new data usage plan for XFINITY Internet service that provides you with a terabyte (1 TB or 1024 GB) of Internet data usage each month as part of your monthly service. If you choose to use more than 1 TB in a month, we will automatically add blocks of 50 GB to your account for an additional fee of $10 each. Your charges, however, will not exceed $200 each month, no matter how much you use. And, we're offering you two courtesy months, so you will not be billed the first two times you exceed a terabyte.

Also, All customers in locations with an Internet Data Usage Plan receive a terabyte per month, regardless of their Internet tier of service. and The data usage plan does not currently apply to XFINITY Internet customers on our Gigabit Pro tier of service. The plan also does not apply to Business Internet customers, customers on Bulk Internet agreements, and customers with Prepaid Internet.